Curt Olson's Page

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"If a community explains their expectations and purpose of their forum, but someone continues to defy those expectations and requests over the course of months, then it really does put the community in a tough spot. It's not about…"

"Hi Patrick,
Hopefully you don't mind me asking a pocketbeagle question? Are you using /dev/ttyS2 in your system? I have ttyS4 working great on my pocketbeagle, but I've been trying all day to get ttyS2 to talk with zero…"

"Hi Patrick, ok I do have a couple questions. Sorry if any of this is stated obviously and I missed it. How many PWM outputs can the pocketpilot support? I see 4 obviously for quad copter use, but can you do more than that? …"

"Yup. I *really* like the concept of the PRU's, but have chosen an easier path to follow by adding my own easy-to-program external processor. I use the teensy to handle all the interrupts and hard real time chores. This…"

"I'm not complaining about the great work folks have done to develop the beaglebone architecture, but I wish they had found a way to allow setting up and programming the PRU's with "simple" arduino style tools. The…"

"Nice work Patrick! There is no greater proof of an idea than seeing actually flying! :-) I have been wondering where all the DIY'ers disappeared to lately (or if they all got sucked up in the push to commercialize and streamline the…"

"Tiziano: thanks for the kind words! It's all just basic pin hole camera model math. :-) When you find the time to work on your project, please let me know how I can help. I can point you towards source code and answer…"

"Well done! Thanks for taking the time to present a clear explanation. Camera calibration is the doorway into an very cool world! I have been using opencv + python (in post processing) to add an augmented reality HUD to my flight…"

Curt Olson's Photos

Curt Olson's Blog

This is probably basic/simple stuff, but here's a quick (raw) video of a fully autonomous wheeled take off in a Senior Telemaster. The basic strategy used so far is to steer with the rudder to hold heading error to zero. Then when airborne, use a small amount…

Recently I purchased an inexpensive usb based oscilloscope to help me do some low level electronics debugging. Owning an oscilloscope is so cool I just had to tell everyone about it! And the price of these USB-based oscilloscopes are in range of many hobbiests. Now I'm kicking myself for…

This is a movie showing the drift pattern of some ocean debris (a large houser line.) We were out 1000nm north of Hawaii on a NOAA research ship. This cruise was part of a project that has also provided a small amount of funding to develop a "marinized" small UAV that could be deployed from a variety of ship sizes with minimal infrastructure requirements.
We found… Continue

This is a little proof of concept video I just put together. The goal is to always keep my aircraft's shadow in the field of view.

Equipment: Senior Telemaster. Fly-Cam-One-3 with built in pan/tilt. Sparkfun 6DOFv4 IMU (it was laying around so I used it.) Gumstix flight computer. Ardupilot used for controlling pan/tilt servos on the camera.

oh okay, i thought i saw something about the u on your website and i guess i misinterpreted it.

thats interesting though, are you involved with the uav research group there? i'm going to be transferring to a university next fall and am curious how the u of m's aerospace engineering program compares with other public universities. have any thoughts on that one?

its too bad about the receiver. i work for tsa and can tell you that it's not likely that someone deliberately took it, but there may be a chance they had to search your property and they mistakenly didn't replace it. was there an inspection notice anywhere inside when you got to hawaii? generally luggage rolls through xray machines without any human interaction, unless it detects something suspect, at which point a person would put their hands on it.

i can provide you with the number to call where they maintain lost property. the guy has been there forever and logs everything that comes and goes, so if they have it he'd know. you wouldn't believe all weird crap they have have down there. but they do only retain it for a period of time before it's given to charity, so let me know soon if you want the number!

i guess on the lighter side, you got 1 successful flight and maybe even a tan!

Hi Curt,
due to your familiarity with FlightGear I figured to ask you: what is GPS resolution as reported by FlightGear? I think that for x-plane sim it's about 165 meters ( 0.1 miles) for longitude and 107m ( 0.07 miles) for lat - can FlightGear's GPS provide GPS data with better resolution?
Thanks

Hi Curt,
I had an 'oops' moment with my earlier comment to you - x-planes GPS resolution is much better then what I mentioned - I had a bug in the code where I am decoding the data....I would still be interested in FlightGear's GPS data resolution..